Here we go again. Let’s clear our throats on the worst of it first. Yes, the Islamic Republic of Iran has an appalling record on human rights abuses – look no further than the reports by both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty. Yes, Iran’s governance is corrupt and impenetrable at many levels; its Green Revolution has been brutally put down.

Having cleared our throats, are we excited or even surprised to find that the Iranian parliament has voted to expel our new ambassador (he’s been on deck for a month, after a long period in which UK relations were handled by a charge d’affaires)? Britain has been in the forefront of the latest cascade of sanctions demands at the United Nations. So many sanctions have been levelled against Iran that one wonders whether there are many more that could be instituted. Of course, Iran’s oil is untouchable because so much of it goes to our fellow UN Security Council Permanent member, China.

Britain’s concern with Iran has mirrored America’s concern and that of many other Western powers – the possible/probable development of nuclear weapons. The latest AEIA report on the matter was wonderfully and consistently unclear as to how far Tehran has got in this matter. What I do know, from talking to Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, is that it is not Israel or America that Iran fears in nuclear terms, it is Pakistan. He told me that if Saudi-backed and funded Pakistani Wahhabist fundamentalists ever get hold of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, Shia Iran will be the number one target.

Britain has a very special place when it comes to relating to Iran. Unlike the Americans who have only ever had full diplomatic relations with Tehran for a total of twenty years, and now none since the revolution in 1979, Britain has managed to hang on through thick and thin for several hundred years, barring assorted scrapes and breaks.
To what advantage is Britain putting its ‘special relationship’ with Iran? Given the UK’s decade-long sharing the lead with America in the charge for more sanctions, are they working? In the absence of an American embassy, the UK has had to suffer the brunt of attacks for the Iranian regime. It has meant that what once was a hugely valuable export market for British goods is all but destroyed. It has meant that equally valuable import of bright Iranian engineering and science students is under siege, and it has meant that any diplomatic advantage Britain had in Tehran is all but dead. The plus side is very hard to divine.

Yet beneath all this tension lies a cool reality of warm and rewarding relations. The British Museum, for example, has managed to extract sumptuous artefacts from Iran that have never been allowed out of the country before. It leant and got back the ‘Elgin Marbles’ of Persian antiquities the Cyrus Cylinder – which the Foreign Office had warned that the Iranians would kidnap and never return. The UK even has a successful if small high end tourist trade with Iran.
So what is it about Iran – a country I have visited down the years some thirty times? I was there for the Revolution and for the US hostage crisis – still the cradle of our present tensions – and many times since. It is a country that looks West. For all its human rights abuses, women have a role in society that leaves Saudi Arabia standing. And that’s the rub. For in the end what is happening today is the continuance of the ‘great game’- a game that rests on the regional rivalry of Saudi Arabia and Iran. The former a coagulation of desert fiefdoms put together to form a Kingdom within the last hundred years and deeply entwined with oil and the West’s hunger for it. Iran has vast amounts of oil too, but unlike Saudi, Iran is an ancient civilisation, 3,500 years old, at least. Iran was creating alphabets and numbers when we were still crawling about in our caves.

The Western powers found Saudi easier to manipulate, even if difficult to control. Iran is stubbornly proud of its past. It has invaded no one in 300 years. So what about is support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and Syria’s Baathist government? Some argue that this is a case of my enemy’s enemy is my friend. It is argued that denied its rightful place in the regional power order, Iran wags the tail of the Americans, who refuse to properly recognise Tehran, by backing the forces Washington regards as the greatest threats to its interests.

So is Britain wise to allow a situation to develop in which we lose our unique purchase with Iran? It’s probably too late to ask.

If you go to North Tehran, you find a community numbering hundreds of thousands (some number them at several million) of exceptionally well educated, rich and Westernised Iranians, who have made their accommodation with a regime of which they despair. Their children fuelled the Green Revolution. My own contacts tell me that the UK’s enthusiastic support for sanctions has added to their despair.

But Britain’s attraction goes well beyond the elite. Iran is a country in which I have felt more welcome than almost any in the region. As the British Museum has shown, ‘engagement’ rewards. Somewhere there must be a British diplomat who wonders, should we risk it in the diplomatic sphere?

An insight into Saudi repression of women in these past few days. The courageous Manal al-Sharif who is trying to win the unbelievably denied right to drive a car, has been locked up in the eastern city of Dammam for driving in public, twice.

Needless to say, in common with others getting behind the Arab Spring, Ms Sharif established a Facebook page securing some 12,000 supporters before the spooks that pepper Saudi society caught it and closed it down. She outwitted them on Twitter too before they moved against that too.

Now she is in jail for doing what? Yes you read it right, getting behind the wheel of a car and, as a woman, driving the thing. Neither the Prophet, not the Koran say anything about women driving, nor indeed about the suppression of women..according to my friendly North London Imam. Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that bans women from driving..of course it militates against women in many other ways too.

Ms Sharif and others decided to take to the roads in May and the Saudi media have even had a number articles about women driving their kids to school and the rest.

These are our allies. This is the Arab state that is our bulwark against Iran, for example. Is it only oil that conditions the UK’s lack of criticism of the Saudi regime, or is it the still vast defence contracts with the Saudis upon which so many thousand of British workers depend? Amid the clamour for rights and democracy in the region, is it such a great idea to be so totally dependent upon such a situation?

Saturday morning and the British Charge d’Affaires breaks cover to issue a public condemnation of Iran’s human rights record, and urges Tehran to respect its obligations on this score. She does so at the very moment that the Government in Tehran is handing back the most precious artefact to reside beyond Iran’s border.

The Cyrus cylinder has been on loan to Iran – against Foreign Office advice, since September. Hundreds of thousands (Iran claims millions) of people have filed past it – a tiny 2,500-year-old fragment of Persian historic culture laid on a velvet cushion. The relic has cuniform lettering on it and is regarded as one of the very earliest statements of human rights known to mankind. Yesterday saw its return to the custody of the British Museum..where it has lain since it was dug up in babylon in the late 19th century. It will arrive back in its showcase this afternoon.

What better a moment for the Foreign Office to remind Iran of its obligations. It was after all the very same Foreign Office who advised that the cylinder would never be returned by the regime in Tehran.

In fact the entire cultural exchange has proved vastly important. Not least because the ‘non mullah’ establishment in Tehran has been able to get away with a ‘nationalist narrative’ of Iran which long predates Islam. Hence the dislike of the object in the highest echelons of the clergy. A more far sighted operative might have predicted that they wanted this pre-Islamic object like a hole in the head. They will have been only too pleased to see the back of it.

The Cyrus Cylinder has ignited a new debate in Iran about the country’s culture and history. the mullahs boycotted the exhibition. The President, the man who could well be his successor, and a current Vice President all embraced the Cyrus Cylinder. Has Britain accidentally witnessed the birth of a new secular movement in Iran that has secured backing from one of many key power quarters in this complex country?

Of all the competing Wiki-leaks, the one about which least is likely to attract much further attention is that which allegedly stems from the Saudi King.

The US diplomatic telegram states baldly that King Abdullah urged the US to bomb Iran. At one level, not much surprise there.

Historic Persian Arab rivalry renders such a demand almost inevitable, particularly given Tehran’s potential for developing a nuclear device.But the revelation came at the very moment that King Abdullah, at 86, was entering a New York clinic for an operation to deal with a life threatening blood clot.

It is rare indeed for the secretive Saudi state to discuss the Monarch’s health.

So for such a condition to be admitted (albeit with the claim that the operation had been a success) may indicate a greater concern than usual.

The King’s successor, 84 year old Prince Sultan also suffers ill-health. The next in line, the Interior Minister Prince Naif is also said to be not a well man.

Only three weeks ago, the King put his 57 year old son Mutaib in charge of the Saudi National Guard – an office he had previously held himself.

Very little objective reporting is ever achieved in or about the Saudi Kingdom. Those who attempt it rarely secure a return visa.

Telling truth to Saudi power can be a risky game. Consequently it remains one of the most under reported countries on earth.

It is no secret that the Afghan Taliban was originally established with Saudi cash and CIA training. The intent was for the Taliban to render the Soviet occupation unsustainable.

The ploy proved more successful and ultimately longer lasting than either the Saudis or the US could have hoped or feared. No one knows for sure how much Saudi cash still fuels the Taliban.

What we do know is that the Saudis openly established and still fund hundreds of radical madrassas in neighbouring Pakistan.

The Saudi branch of the Sunni Islamic faith is committed to the pursuit and expansion of Wahabism – one of the most radical courses known within the Islamic faith.

Only last month it was revealed that Saudi cash had funded the publication and circulation of some 5,000 copies of a radical Islamic book in a network of UK weekend Muslim schools.

Who rules Saudi Arabia matters acutely in the current struggle between mainstream moderate Islam and the radical forms endorsed by the Saudi Royal family.

King Abdulla is described by Saudi watchers as a ‘reformer’. It’s a tricky concept in a country that still forbids women to drive and discriminates against them in other far reaching ways.

It’s a tricky concept with such a woeful record more generally on human rights.

Some of the candidates for Kingship in the ‘younger’ generation are described by one former UK Ambassador to Saudi, to whom I have spoken, as ‘hardliners’.

Hang on to your seats, an awkward period may be at hand in the Saudi Kingdom. A call for the bombing of Iran could prove to be the least of it says my contact.

Whatever it was that happened on Twitter yesterday – the stomach falling in and revealing cauldrons of spam - speaks to the frailty of our techno cyber dependence these days.

I am currently the victim of a mass bombardment of my inbox by a campaign to “save” assorted prisoners in Iran. It happens that I am a self confessed Iranophile in that I have been there a lot (was there during the revolution and beyond).

Covering the country since has not been easy. Nor indeed has the process been easy of trying to cope with the international response to it all.

But what have I done to deserve upwards of one thousand copycat emails that have clogged my box and consumed far too much time as I remove them to my junk box and “block sender”? The action has been completely counter productive. Not only will I do nothing about the unfortunate people for whom these misguided emailers plead, but I am developing an irrational dislike (I won’t put it stronger) of every one of these emailers for defiling “my property”. Who are they?

In desperation over the weekend I called my own computer support people. They did their best, but the “spam blocker” is some third party company that specialises in these things and so far their systems have failed.

In any case, I get so much good info from my Iranian contacts via email, I don’t want to risk spamming them in order to keep out these marauding invaders.

Being of a highly techie nature, I have analysed the problem. The stomach of my inbox has fallen in and revealed a cauldron of idiots who think collective bombardment of a journalist’s inbox is in some way going to help their cause.

It has achieved precisely the opposite outcome. In the meantime, I’m looking out for a stomach stapler!

A year ago he was in the notorious Evin jail in Tehran being subjected to repeated torture and false confessions.

Yesterday he was standing in the Registry office of a West London Council, with his baby in his arms and his beautiful Italian wife at his side.

The wedding was a year late, and all the more poignant for it. Of the forty guests, there were half a dozen of her Italian relatives.

There were perhaps three or four Iranians, half a dozen Anglo Iranians, a Russian, and maybe half a dozen British-born guests of whom I had the honour to be one.

Here was a very English moment – a local authority provided ‘salon’ and registrars, providing the opportunity to colourful group of Europeans and Persians.

We had been drawn together to witness and celebrate the marriage of a man enjoying a safe haven from a regime that has now condemned him in absentia to half a lifetime in prison with hard labour.

I felt proud to be present at an event in which my own society had played a critical role in his freedom and present safety.

As the small woman registrar intoned the marital vows, and her assistant offered a concluding thought, I suddenly realised that she, like the bride, was Italian – he was of mixed English and Iranian Kurdish stock.He later told me his mother was from Sanandaj in Iranian Kurdistan, his father from England.

His wishes of good luck were expressed in flawless Farsi.

Neither of these officials was here by chance or design. They were both simply carrying out another day’s wok for their local authority employer.

I thought to myself, where else on earth?

Amid the thrill of the “new politics”, is there the slightest possibility of any UK “new thinking” about Iran?

In a week in which the emerging world market nations of Brazil and Turkey have done some seriously creative thinking on Iran’s nuclear programme, don’t hold your breath.

Britain still enjoys the largest diplomatic premises in Tehran, still enjoys the virtually unbroken diplomatic relations stretching back a century and a half and more. Enjoys?

Well maybe not. Contrast the UK’s inheritance in Iran with that of the US. America has risked precisely twenty years of full relations with Tehran in the same period. Thirty years on, America has still not accepted the 1979 Islamic Revolution. And thereby hangs today’s tale.

This week began with an extraordinarily bold and imaginative move by Brazil and Turkey to broker a deal to ship most of its stockpile of enriched Uranium out of the country.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Iran has a month to deliver on the deal, or “she is on her own”.

The beauty of this move is that both Brazil – whose charismatic President Lula was in Tehran earlier this week – and Turkey, are members of the UN Security Council. However they cannot veto proposed actions by the Council.

Only a week ago the Americans were celebrating the unity of the permanent five on the council (who do each have a veto) in moving to new sanctions against Iran.

The Turkish-Brazilian move seriously threatened the US’s latest attempt to isolate Iran still further.

Hillary Clinton thought she had full “permanent five” support for this fourth effort to strengthen sanctions against Tehran. She told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “this announcement (of a new sanctions round against Iran) is as convincing an answer to the efforts undertaken in Tehran over the last few days as any we could provide.”

Not often China can be relied upon to ride to the rescue. Overnight her ambassador to the UN has shown every sign of not going along with America’s move. He says he wants diplomatic dialogue.

So where’s Britain in all this? No “new thinking” here. The new UK government is rowing in behind America’s “old politics” on Iran. Is there the slightest chance that William Hague will finally declare efforts to relate to Iran through its nuclear programme only, is both bankrupt and actually dead?

Our flying pig, last seen flying down Whitehall last week, has turned left into King Charles Street. Is the Foreign Office about to say boo to America’s flatulent, sanctions emitting goose?

Whilst Washington and London fantasise about new sanctions, the Mullahocracy in Tehran is getting away with the wholesale abuse of human rights against its opponents. Peaceful protest is being met with torture and imprisonment.

The West’s capacity to do anything to remedy that has been neutralised by sacrificing its influence on the altar of nuclear obsession.

It is hardly an explosive statement to suggest that it is time for “new thinking” on Iran. Given Britain’s historic links with the country, not a bad issue by which to judge the UK coalition government’s “new politics”.

And meantime out in the real world, Iran’s age-old adversary Pakistan is urging its own age-old adversary India to join the $7.6 billion pipeline project which will buy natural gas from Iran’s vast reserves and use it to alleviate severe power shortages which afflict the Indian subcontinent.

Brazil, Turkey, Pakistan, India – getting on with life beyond the old thinking of the West? Burning Iranian gas whilst we fiddle?

That pig needs to do more than burp if the rest of us are not to be left wailing in the winds that swirl around the UN headquarters in New York.

Put simply, he’s in Israel to try to dissuade the Israelis from bombing Iran.

There remains a strong thread of opinion inside the Israeli cabinet that argues that Iran is building a nuclear bomb and needs to be stopped in its tracks. Reportedly, Israel does not have a supply of the American developed deep bunker busting bomb required to penetrate the storage chambers in Natanz where, beneath some 55ft of reinforced concrete, Iran keeps her enriched uranium.

But the US Vice President, Joe Biden is not alone in his mission.

It is rare for so senior a US official to commit himself to six days in the region. He’s there with President Obama’s chief Middle East negotiator George Mitchell. In truth, Mitchell, the abidingly decent, patient and ultimately successful negotiator of the Northern Ireland pace has got effectively nowhere thus far in his attempts to negotiate a breakthrough in the Middle East.

Many who study the region are saying now that the option for what George Bush became the first president to enunciate – a two state solution – has passed.

Despite America’s very public support of the UN call for a cessation of work on new Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the building work continues apace. The Obama administration has discovered what the world already knew, no one is prepared to do anything about it.

As one former UK envoy to the UN put it to me the other day, “Were Israel any other state, it is hard to imagine that her actions in the occupied territories would by now have secured a UN sanctions regime”.

Despite the reality that the 2009 presidential victory secured by Barack Obama was less dependent upon donations from the pro-Israel lobby than any in recent history – owing to the sheer mass and diversity of the small donations that swelled his electoral war chest – Obama does not appear to observers to be running an administration that is going to get tough with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government any time soon.

The strangling of Gaza, the settlement building programme, and the flouting of years of UN resolutions have never secured anything more than the occasional American finger wag.

So, does Joe Biden’s arrival in the region signal change? Don’t hold your breath – and yet could there be something afoot?

Obama has in his first year made no serious personal investment in the peace process. Is Biden perhaps his ‘John the Baptist’ in this regard? Many will hope so. The conflict remains the greatest single fuel source for Muslim discontent from Indonesia to the East End of London.

Incidentally, it wasn’t until I saw that Mr Biden would not be seeing Egypt’s President Mubarak, that I discovered that the octogenarian leader is in a hospital bed in Germany after a gallbladder op last Saturday.

But then peace in the Middle East has, of late, rarely depended upon Egypt. She operates at least as draconian a border operation against the Palestinians as Israel administers.

I was there! Thirty-one years ago, wedged amongst a chanting, seething sea of black-clad woman in chadors moving through downtown Tehran. So dense was the throng that even filming what we were witnessing proved almost impossible.

It was exciting, we knew the Islamic revolution – a people’s clamour for change, for spiritual renewal in the aftermath of the feeble fading of the Shah’s corrupt pro-Western regime – would change the balance of the world in which we lived, but we could not fathom how.

We knew too that we were “in on a moment of modern history”.

So impossible was it to detach ourselves from the throng that we decided as soon as we had completed whatever we could do for that day’s news transmission (thank god for the time difference with London), we would leave Tehran and head north.

Before the day was ended, as the crowds began to disperse, we crammed into our Ford transit minibus and headed for the Caspian Sea.

Why? Firstly I wanted to know how the revolution was playing beyond the metropolis, but secondly I wanted to find out what had happened to the facility that represented the West’s gravest concern.

Somewhere on the coast of the Caspian, the Americans had built an early warning “listening” station – a series of golf ball shaped domes from which they monitored Russian nuclear tests in the Urals on the other side of the sea.

I had spotted the profiles of the golf balls ten years earlier as a student.

I had driven a bus from Liverpool to New Delhi and passed this way. The problem was that I had no idea which end of the Caspian’s southern coast I had seen them, and no one would tell us.

At daybreak we started from Tabriz and headed east. We drove for much of the day, seeing little evidence of revolution beyond a few knots of khaki-clad guards in the streets.

Just as my crew was beginning to conclude that I was weak in the head and an inventor of golf ball structures – there they were! Squeezed on a hill top, white beneath the low grey cloud base.

Two teenage revolutionary guards sat on metal chairs at the gates, with guns on their laps, oblivious to what it was that they guarded.

The golf balls hummed. “Don’t go in,” I shouted. “They may have been booby-trapped. We threw stones through the open door of one of the structures.

No boom, no bang. We entered to a find a cacophony of whirring computers. Purple inked zig-zagging graphs on gridded paper spewed from the machines.

In the residential block, clothes lay on the beds, children’s toys on the floors, food on the kitchen tables. Someone had left in a hurry.

Back in Tehran, armed with fabulous film of it all, I clambered into bed and slept the sleep of the dead. I was awakened by a knock on my hotel room door. X was an intelligence officer from the British Embassy, he wanted to know what we knew and what compromises lay in our films.

I did a shameful trade. I eventually let him advise which shots concerned him in return for information as to the whereabouts of the recently delivered state-of-the art Foxbat US fighter jets.

My love-affair with Iran was in full spate, an exhilarating rollercoaster of a story that is still in full spate. No-one knows where the revolution will lead – we are no clearer today than we were in those brittle, cold February days thirty-one years ago.

So, China has overhauled Europe to become Iran’s major trading partner.

Last year official Iranian government figures showed EU trade at $35bn, and trade with China at $29bn. But according to the Financial Times today, those figures ignored the trade that enters Iran through the United Arab Emirates – some $15bn.

In the meantime China’s dependence upon Iranian energy represents 11 per cent of her total energy consumption.

So, at the very moment when the US, France and the UK edge towards a new sanctions regime against Tehran, realities on the ground ensure that China will not go along with them.

Russia reportedly looks a little more disposed to a new sanctions regime, but in truth, the world community should be looking at other routes to relating to the Islamic republic.

As I discovered at Christmas, when I visited Iran and met with Ahmadinejad, there is division, chaos and uncertainty in the upper echelons of power in the Islamic Republic.

It has become a well worn tradition that amid such tensions, President Ahmadinejad likes to play the “nuclear card“. The UN inspectors are bemused by the under use of centrifuges at Natanza (the enrichment plant near Esfahan).

There is also a suspicion that scientists have managed to enrich uranium to a level of 20 per cent and have enough of it to build one bomb, or not. In other words the UN inspection process doesn’t really know precisely where Iran has got to in its bomb making capacity.

I have always believed that this is exactly how the shambles at the top of Iran wants it.

I have always believed that relating to Iran through the nuclear non-dialogue is a blind cul-de-sac. The real problem remains – with whom should we try to relate?

Well, it is still possible to talk with Ahmadinejad, but I could not sense when I met him whether he actually runs anything at all. I suspect he has influence upon much and control of almost nothing.

The real power is supposed to reside with the supreme leader – Ayatollah Khamenei. But he’s made some serious mistakes in the course of attempting to deal both with the electoral fraud and the “green revolution“. There is widespread talk of his having to step down or aside – ill health, or some other pretext.

No, the real power, the real control lies in the hands of the Revolutionary Guards and the thuggish gangs that constitute the Basij.

But they are split too – between the old seasoned revolutionaries who deposed the Shah and survived that ghastly war with Iraq in the 1980’s, and the young upstarts who have seized many of the economic leavers, and enriched themselves in the process.

These new groupings don’t travel outside the country, and are very focused on the mosque. They will be particularly hard to hit with targeted sanctions.

Hence the alternative – engagement – but with whom? Anyone and everyone. Trade, commerce, banking, oil, culture – there are problems with every segment of Iranian life.

But beating beneath all these problems reside a vast numbers of hearts in men and woman who want change.

The Islamic revolution has become deeply polluted according Mr Mousavi – the opposition leader and no radical himself.

Starving the discontented with more sanctions will achieve nothing beyond the beating batons of renewed internal repression. I have advocated carpet bombing Iran with laptops before on Snowblog.

But conceptually that is what the world should do, drench the place with supply. There is a rich and ready market.

Exploiting it will empower the people and terrify the agents of repression.